The Reducing Bounce Rate eBook

Ever feel like “bounce rate” is ruining your blogging efforts?

During the summer of 2012, I put one of my larger blogs through an intensive case study to eliminate it’s bounce rate. This post will fill you in on exactly what happened, and below you’ll see that I even packaged what I learned into a PDF eBook.

Before I show you that, let me fill you in on what bounce rate is and why it’s harmful for a blog.

What is “bounce rate?”

Bounce rate is a traffic statistic used to describe how many visitors leave your site and how many people stick around. Here’s a definition (you want it LOW):

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single page visits your blog receives where the user exits or closes the tab before clicking anything on your blog.

If you get 100 visits today and 70 of them leave without clicking anything, then you have a bounce rate of 70%.

Make sense?

This blog currently has a bounce rate of 0.98%, which I’m okay with.

New websites naturally have high bounces rates as they figure things out. But as you progress, having a high bounce rate (anything over 20%) can be seriously detrimental to your efforts.

Higher bounce rate generally translates to…

Less comments

Less shares to social media

Less conversions

Less constumer leads

Less sales

…because your visitors are leaving before you can get them to take action!

Let me illustrate what I mean with two different scenarious.

Why bounce rate is destructive

Say you wake up Saturday morning, brew some coffee, and write a post that YOU think is really great.

Hey, I would read it 🙂

After you’ve polished it up and added an image or two, you share that post to Facebook. You sit back and smile…in horror.

What happens with a low (GOOD) bounce rate:

What happens with a high (BAD) bounce rate:

Bounce rate is a wrench stuck in your assembly line.

It prevents you from taking visitors along the path to becoming loyal followers of your site. The biggest, most famous blog leverage tons of loyal followers into full time incomes. So you need to start building one.

The CRAZIEST thing is there are SO many reasons things could be going wrong. You design could be confusing. You might have ads in all the wrong places.

You might just be using the wrong font (yes, a BIG problem!)

How to fix things

When I logged into my Honest College blog (still live) at the beginning of the Summer of 2012, this is what I saw.

I knew I was missing out. I was earning a decent living of off Google Adsense, but I had done some valuable reading on how bounce rate limits great things.

Like clicks, subscribes, and page views.

So I went to work. Now fast forward four months…

Some proof behind my methods

Four months after my case study begun, I had conquered bounce rate.

I was just making small yet vital tweaks and all I had bought were a cheap domain name and hosting and an Aweber subscription for my newsletter.

Of course if you’re anything like me, you will want some proof. Here is a split screenshot from my Google Analytics profile. The only editing done is adding in the “Before” and “After”.

Find out what happened

If you are a new blogger or have started a new site, it’s a really good idea to pay attention to bounce rate.

To help you out, I tied up my finest points into a brief eBook you can download for free when you subscribe here.

Use the form below to get my free eBook. Discover how the smallest modifications brought me 19,000 more page views from 2,000 more visitors and a whole lot of other positive results.

The scariest thing is, blogs with massive traffic numbers can afford to have higher bounces rates (if you get 1 million pageviews / month losing 50% to bounces would still keep the advertisers happy). It is the blogs with low traffic numbers, or those just getting started out, that really stand to get wipe out by bounce rate.

Signing up

When you grab your free eBook you also get access to the exclusive Dear Blogger newsletter.

A double-whammy.

Of course, if you don’t want to subscribe, that’s just fine too. Newsletters and eBooks definitely are not for everyone. You have a busy life I’m sure, and an agenda of your own. I would still encourage you to drop a comment in around the blog.

About DearBlogger

DearBlogger is a free WordPress resource and community geared towards providing you free and fast advice to build a better blog. DearBlogger was founded in September 2012 in Manhattan by Greg Narayan. Our mission on this site is to provide clearer answers than what's out there currently, and make blogging, advertising, online marketing, web design, eCommerce, and any kind of website creation mainly using WordPress easier for beginners.